Within the past 20 years the speed at which computers can operate has increased many orders of magnitude while their cost has decreased equally dramatically. All of this has been made possible by the invention of semiconductor devices and the development of integrated circuits. By means of this technology many thousands of circuit elements can be fitted onto a chip of semiconductor material measuring only a fraction of an inch on each side. Typically, hundreds of such circuits are made simultaneously side-by-side, on a common wafer. The yield in such a process, however, tends to decrease as the packing density and the size of each chip is increased. In addition, heat dissipation tends to become a problem as the packing density is increased. Finally, as the number of elements proliferate, more and more of the chip surface area is taken up by the interconnecting leads. On present day ICs, anywhere from 30 to 90 percent of the chip can be so occupied. Furthermore, as the chip size increases, the increased lead lengths become a limiting factor determining the speed at which the device can operate.
It is, accordingly, the broad object of the present invention to derive the advantages of high density ICs without incurring the penalties normally associated with such devices.